Sizing It Up

Dr Stephen Sizer is a very conservative Evangelical indeed, and his only offence is to have articulated that tradition's historic position whereby Jesus Christ had fulfilled the Old Testament (I know, what a thought), rather than a nineteenth-century innovation called Dispensationalism, which is mostly based on a work of pseudo-scholarship called the Scofield Reference Bible, and which has wound up regarding Zionism as some sort of fulfilment of Biblical prophecy.

That view of Zionism is in no small measure due to having no idea that there were ancient indigenous Christians in the Holy Land. But in fact, the new Israeli Government recently desecrated the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion, which is maintained by the local Anglican diocese on behalf of a British owner. Although, so far as I am aware, this has yet to be tested in court, it is probably now illegal in Britain, either to criticise that desecration, or to say that the Old Israel gave way to the New, which is the Church. But read the New Testament. That is the Gospel. Not the IHRA Definition.

Israel is now run by people who believe that there is an absolute religious obligation to burn down churches, since those are idolatrous. No matter how sparsely Protestant a church may be, the Divinity of Christ is in itself an idolatrous assertion, and that is why no such obligation applies to mosques, so the church must burn. And the churches are burning in Israel and on the West Bank, although the obligation is in principle universal.

It is clear from the Bible that the pre-Israelite population, the founders of Jerusalem, never went away. They never have yet. They became Christians when or before the Roman Empire became Christian, and they adopted the use of Arabic at the time of a Muslim Conquest contemporaneous with the Saxon Conquest of what is now England. Those ancient indigenous Christians are still there. The founders of modern Palestinian identity, they are the people of Shireen Abu Akleh.

I doubt it, but if Dr Sizer really did say that Israel had been behind the attacks of 11th September 2001, then that would have been a factual error, since the true culprit was our dear friend, Saudi Arabia. But it was not anti-Semitic. Israel is a state, that is all. It is only in very, very recent years that there have come to be more Jews in Israel than in the rest of the world, that is still only a bare majority, and at least 20 per cent of the population of Israel, inside the Green Line, is not Jewish. Take all of this from someone whom Google, as is its wont, has today been locating in the ward of the former Leader of Durham County Council. I have never lived or worked there.